Document Formatting interpretation error

[Teresa]

When I open an existing Word document using File, Open
from the application, the document opens showing the text
but without all the formatting (the various fonts,
alignments, pictures, headers/footers, tables, etc). At
the end of the text is some gibberish and then text which
describes the formatting that is missing (the names of
the fonts, the type of alignments, table info, names of
any pictures inserted, the version of Word used to create
the document, etc).

I tried "Detect and Repair" and that didn't work. My
husband restored to the previous day but that didn't
work. Interesting enough, we were able to open these
documents using My Computer and the formatting showed up
fine. And when we open the same documents we had opened
using My Computer through the "Recent" files list they
open with the formatting also.

Has anyone else experienced this problem and if so, how
did you fix it?

 

[Jay Freedman]

Hi, Teresa,

You have the "Files of type" box in the File > Open dialog set to
"Recover text from any file". Change it to "Word documents" or "All
files".

See http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/RecoverText.htm.

 

[Teresa]

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU! Children at my
playgroup were fooling with the computer and must have
accidently changed that setting!!

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Not necessarily. If you try to open a file type that Word doesn't recognize,
it will default to Recover Text from Any File, and this setting is "sticky,"
even between Word sessions, in Word 97 and 2000 (that was fixed in Word
2002).